


Never Taking Time to Break

by BeautifullyLovely



Category: Mortal Instruments Series - Cassandra Clare
Genre: Childhood, Falling In Love, Friendship, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-17
Updated: 2016-01-17
Packaged: 2018-05-14 12:34:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,733
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5744056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BeautifullyLovely/pseuds/BeautifullyLovely
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are days when you think each and every being is fallen. There are days when you think a special few might make up for the rest.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Never Taking Time to Break

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: Anything that might have appeared in TMI, such as light violence and mention of rape (when it comes to a warlock's parents).

The boy in front of you is looking at you in awe, as if he has never seen someone so beautiful.

“I'm Alec.” He says, and he's smiling like he can't help the way his mouth wants to curl up at the corners. The grin is a little crooked, a little wrong on his face, and you feel a completely unforeseen sadness at the fact that this boy is clearly not used to having a smile grace his lips.

He's looking you in the eye as you offer a polite hand. You can tell that your eyes--unnaturally and demonically bright, whether you want them to be or not--are not terrifying _or_ wonderfully exotic to him. He takes them in as naturally as the rest of you, and it singes more than even his touch.

The pouch at his back catches the light as he reaches for you, and the arrows in it gleam, a heroic gold.

 

The first time he meets a Shadowhunter, they try to shoot him through the heart with the help of their bow.

He is staying in a church at the time, rather unfortunately. He is sick of prayer, having repeated the words of religion at his stepfather's (and how strange, he still sometimes forgets to add the ‘step’) urgings until they grew stale and wrong in his mouth. He also has little faith, which sometimes happens to children who are almost drowned by their guardians, or at least he assumes.

Still, the little faith that he does have has propelled him through hunger and villagers’ angry chants and semi-dying a couple of times to what looks to be an oasis on the horizon. They glance at him--a disgusting, skinny thing, left too long out in the sun and next to passing over to another realm--pause in the quiet of the open air, then open the door just a crack, as if they don’t want him inside but feel they can’t leave him out to rot either.

They gift him clothes--ugly brown shirts and pants, practical but sad, and food. Also sad, if he is to offer an opinion, which he doesn't, because he is finally, _finally_ feeling the brush of meal past his lips.

He helps them out for their kindness--learning to cook, fetching pamphlets, working with them in the gardens--and in return they try to save his soul.

It doesn’t go as planned. The demon won’t come out, they say, even as they pile him with hymns and ointments and all else. He is past the point of believing his soul can ever be saved, let alone turn to something good, but he endures their bouts of useless healing with only a minorly annoyed frown. It is, on the whole, nowhere near as horrible as what he has endured before.

It is an average day when the man comes for him, and so he does not expect it. He’ll want to kill himself for this later, because if anything, he should know better by now. Even later than later, he’ll change his mind, and want to kill the man instead.

He is preparing a morning meal when the man knocks on the door, and the people of the church let him inside and welcome him warmly to the table. The man is older than him, able to grow scruff around his chin and lips, and he carries himself with a confidence others only wish they had. The man is striking, to put it plainly, and even though he is too young to feel sexual or romantic love--too young even to know he’ll feel them for a variety of shapes and genders and species, even--he still, in his mind, catalogues the man as beautiful.

The man talks business. He can hear his voice, a loud and proud sort of thing, even with a wall between them. The man is smart in his questions, even smarter in his answers, and he thrills at the idea of him maybe staying a while. Someone new to talk to, who doesn’t look at him like a project to be solved, but a companion to share discourse with.

“Boy,” One of the churchmen calls. “I can see you glancing around the partition. Come, bring our food and serve our honored guest.”

He hurries a bit, worried of being scolded, but even more worried of disappointing the stranger he had been eyeing just seconds before. On soft footfalls he brings out a bowl, heading for the man first as is proper, and as he does so the man looks up.

For a moment, his smile is inviting, a full teeth grin that is as kind as it is polite. The lines of his face are smooth, and the boy wants to trace them.

Then, it happens. It’s when the man looks into his eyes.

Something about him disgusts the man, and every good and kind thing about him vanishes into a face of pure and utter hatred. At him, all at him.

It’s worse than anything ever, worse than feeling his lungs gasp for air as he was held under a sheet of water.

He drops the bowl.

The man turns to the churchmen. “Why are you harboring a warlock?” He asks, standing. The beautiful man is suddenly very tall, and very scary.

The churchmen look to one another, silently asking which of them will be the one to speak.

“Sir,” One steps forward. He is still too frozen, in body and in mind, to comprehend who. “He was half-dead when we found him, and has been nothing but helpful since he has arrived. If he was to be a danger, rest assured, we would have brought him to the Shadowhunters at once.”

“He’s a warlock. They’re all dangerous, whether they’re showing it or not.” The man turns his stare back to him. “How long have you been here, warlock? Feeding off these innocent men?”

He shivers.

“How long?”

“I don’t--” Words are hot and sticky in his mouth, and he can’t get them to come out. He can’t, he can’t--

“Tell me, or I’ll kill you where you stand.”

He, wretchedly enough, starts to cry. “I don’t know what a warlock is.” He shakes. “I don’t know what you want.” _Please, please,_ he thinks, _despite everything that has happened, I am not ready to be struck down now._

The man turns around, and at first he cannot guess why. Then he sees the tips of arrows, gleaming out from a pouch like the sharp teeth of a hungry dog.

He runs.

The door to the kitchens locks on the outside. When he first learned of this, a year ago, he thought it funny and impractical, judging it every time he entered the connected room.

It is this door that saves his life.

Ten seconds and a breaking and entering rune for the man, while his prey is flying, his feet leaping off the ground in heart-ratcheting steps.

He runs, he runs even as arrows graze his shoulders and legs and, once, a neck. _I don’t want to be here._ He thinks. The words are as clear as a bell in his head, chiming throughout his body, even as everything else is a blur. Brown splashes for tree trunks. Wavy green lines for leaves. He doesn’t dare take a second to glance at the sky. An arrow hits his shoulder, and blood pours.

 _Anywhere else. No--_ One foot touches ground. _\--A place not on land, where I’m untraceable, untouchable._

His eyes close to a forest, and open to the sea.

He did not do it purposefully, yet here he is: a boat, far away from any earth, blue in every direction. He is untraceable as well, depending on one’s definition, for he has no idea whatsoever of where in the world he is.

 

You kiss him even though you know it’s a bad idea. You want to say you can’t help it, but you can. He’s not irresistible or anything like that, merely interesting and worth a second look.

That doesn’t stop you.

You like helping people, and Alec is clearly in need of help. He’s like a flower unopened. Someone you know, with everything in you, would be lovely, if only he could unfurl.

He kisses with lust, which is expected, and heart, which is less expected. It’s the heart that gets to you, truth be told, and somehow a kiss turns into a date. Next friday, seven pm sharp.

 

He has a name now: Bane. The Silent Brothers gave it to him on an average day in May, when, in a fit of anger, he smashed every window within the Silent City’s walls.

Bane is beginning to hate average days. Or, maybe, the expectation of them. Or, maybe, that he still expects anything at all in the first place.

He isn’t sure whether a name of destruction and horror is better than no name at all. It makes it easy to get his attention, at least.

The Silent Brothers had found him, hands rubbing at arms in poor imitation of a coat’s warmth, leaning heavily against a barrel with his knees drawn up to his chin. They had taken him upstairs and laid him in a bed, where he slept for two days before waking to an offered cup of water.

He had seen their faces eventually, on that tiny boat, because he was living with them at that point, so it was unavoidable.

His first thought was that they were horrifying things, plastic-like dolls with scars at every edge. Of course it was--that was everyone’s first thought.

His next was this: _Are you me? Are you like me as well?_ And he had reached out with gentle fingers and traced the edge of a mark at the closet one’s eye. They had flinched back.

He wasn’t, they told him, and Magnus didn’t know whether to be relieved or sad.

They took him to the Silent City, after reaching what he learned to be Spain. There, some of the oldest and most respected of the Shadowhunters tell him who he is; where his father and his mother, the two species that brought along his birth, had told him nothing.

A warlock: one who does magic and spells. A demon’s son. He learns that his mother was raped, and this was how he was created.

They don’t teach him anything about magic, and routinely express their disgust for his ability to weld it, yet they never expect to leach it out of him or change him in any way.

Again: which is better? Bane is not sure.

Sometimes, he’ll wonder if the Silent Brother’s care, or half-care, as it were, is what leads him to not dismissing Shadowhunters entirely like many of his fellow Downworlders. This wonder will mostly cease after Raphael Santiago comes under his wing, who he helps later on and watches over as the boy saves himself.

Raphael thinks of other Downworlders as lesser to vampires, despite the utter hypocrite’s blossoming friendship with Ragnor, one of Magnus’ closest warlock friends.

Bane, for all his trying, is too tired of hate, years before his magic peaks and he is forever cast into ageless stone.

 

He protects you without thinking about it--moving in front of you as if his body could shield you from any disaster. You don’t know how to take it.

The last time you were protected was in childhood, and those memories are mixed with frustration and eventual resentment. You weren’t strong then, and you disliked having others stand in your way in the name of looking after you.

You are strong now, to the point where it’s a little ridiculous that an eighteen-year-old Shadowhunter wants to protect _you,_ a being with more than a few centuries under your belt.

And yet: something in your heart spills open, uncomfortably and comfortably so, when he moves to guard you, his awkward body transformed into something confident and self-assured.

He is, in that moment, completely unfurled.

 

Ragnor enters the Silent City with the pouch on his back and the clothes on his body. He leaves with those things as well.

“Ragnor,” Bane says, his strides trying hard to keep up. “Where are you going?”

And an unhelpful addition.

“You’re not coming with me, if that’s what you’re planning.”

For the first time of many, many more, Magnus Bane (who is not yet Magnus, but will be soon) ignores Ragnor Fell’s decisions and plants in his own, like he runs the place, to Ragnor’s unending suffering.

At least, this is what Ragnor tells him years later. He only sort of believes him. Yes, he did in fact push Ragnor’s wants out to place in his own, but in this (one) instance it was a good thing, because Ragnor got the best thing that ever happened to him. A life-long friend that he occasionally wanted to strangle, but only in an affectionate way.

It is with Ragnor that he starts to find his fanciful passions, such as clothing and good wine and pretty furniture, much to Ragnor’s frustration. Of course, it is the first time he has been allowed to feel like he wasn’t just surviving, but living, so it should have been expected.

“What is that?” Ragnor asks, gesturing to Magnus’ shirt. Magnus smooths down the linen. The touch feels guilty and smug and lovely-- _this is mine,_ he thinks, _something just for me._

 

You tell him “I love you.” Which is nothing new. You say it in Indonesian, which is.

There's something about your first language that feels heavy on the tongue, as personal as you can ever get with another person. It's bitter and sweet, this phrase of affection, but maybe it's just slightly less bitter when you're directing the words at him.

Because it's true: you love him. You love him even as you're breaking his heart.

 

He calls himself Magnus, in a bout of lingering resentment at the Shadowhunters who raised him. It has been years now, and he is still finding ways in which he feels shame at what he is.

He thinks to replace the bad with the good, Magnus instead of Bane, but somehow it feels incomplete.

He meets Catarina when he pulls her off a pyre in Spain, getting burned in the process. She takes him by the hand after, running a soothing touch over the pain until the skin feels new. “There,” She says, smiling, clearly proud of her craft. “All better.”

Magnus is fascinated, and asks her to show him how she does it. He doesn’t take to it the same way, not given the healing touch by whatever demon forced himself on his mother, but he perseveres.

The first thing he heals is an injured cat, trapped under a fallen box, his bones broken in the legs. The cat is crying pitifully the entire time, and it picks at Magnus’ chest, makes him want to cry himself, but he knows that if he stops the healing won’t be complete and the cat will be left to rot.

He can’t have that. So he continues.

When he lifts his aching hands, his body trembling in exhaustion, the cat slips easily out of Magnus’ warmth, tossing his head back as he tramps off into the shady lines of the city.

It’s what some might call a miracle.

“Amazing, isn’t it?” Catarina asks, her hand on his shoulder.

“Yes.” He says, watching the cat’s tail swish as he trots away.

It is the first time he thinks that maybe his soul doesn’t need saving, that for a few dark years he had only forgotten that it was already there.

He decides to go by Magnus Bane in the end, the bad and the good forever intertwined but both clearly present.

 

You expect him to be hesitant, but he isn’t, not really. He’s nervous, utterly nervous, by the way his hands are shaking, but he covers your body with his own like it was meant to be there.

You strip him of his clothing, and trace the runes etched forever into his skin. You used to be ambivalent about their patterns, but you think you can grow to like them on him.

 

The Shadowhunters throw out the plates they ate off of, as if they were no better than dogs.

Magnus don’t know why this hits him hardest, when he spent upwards of an hour listening to them tell him and his people that they were not worth Shadowhunter time, and that their needs did not matter, despite gathering for what were supposed to be peace talks.

Maybe it’s because it is something that cannot be fought against, not in spells or words. Something so deep seated and so woven into a cultural fabric that it has no chance of being fixed. Maybe, after years and years of derogatory treatment, this is the final straw, the thing that broke the camel’s back, no coming back from this one.

It’s likely something else. It’s likely that he feels a fool, having given these idiots chance upon chance as they spit in his face again and again. If only he could be more like Camille, who is smart and does not expect there to be good in people, just because she wants it to be there.

He takes her hand and walks off, trying to pretend like none of it mattered, Edmund Herondale a burn in the back of his mind.

 

After you break up with him, you tell yourself that it was inevitable. That doesn't make it much better, really. You still gorge on takeout because why not and lay on the couch where Chairman Meow attacks your hair with surprising tenacity.

Catarina doesn’t generally put up with your bullshit, but you were still hoping for a one-time pass.

“Talk to him.” She tells you, and hands you over the position of Warlock Representative (and how annoying, you are rather sure that Shadowhunter representatives at least have something else to tag to their name along with the species marker, but alas, progress doesn’t sprint; it crawls).

You’re starting to feel like maybe everything can be OK, right up to the point where you’re gifted a one-way ticket to a hell dimension.

Then, well, all bets are off.

 

He meets two of his siblings. One can’t talk, because by the time Magnus reaches them, their body is more bone than skin. The other is slightly off, to put it lightly.

“Asmodeus,” The man screeches. “No, please, I didn’t do anything. I didn’t.”

One minute, Magnus is enjoying a fine cup of tea in a tiny outdoor cafe, the next, he is staring into the eyes of a man who knows of death more intimately than the corpses buried underground.

It reminds Magnus of the time he was almost killed by a Shadowhunter in his youth, but in reverse. This is exponentially worse.

He hovers, unsure of where to step. The man is making a scene, causing the mundanes in the area to cower against the shops lining the street. Each way Magnus moves, whether forward or backward, right or left, makes the man let out another piercing shriek.

“Please, calm down.” He tries to lower his voice in a soothing tone, but his words only make the man burst into a wretched sobbing fit.

“No,” The man gasps, over and over, a mantra. “No I won’t be taken, no I won’t--I won’t--”

And right before everyone’s eyes, he turns to flame. When the flame is gone, he is as well, no half-remains or ashes.

Magnus has to erase a lot of minds that day. It is the day he learns of his father’s name.

 

You call on your father because you have to, and you pledge to give up your immortality because you must.

It is rather comical, in the very darkest of senses. Right when you start to feel like you’re living again, you have to die.

These absolutely stupid nephilim, and Simon (you know his name, of course you do, but it was much more fun to pretend that you didn’t), are all standing there, and they are such beautiful people. They’re a mess really, but so is everyone. It’s in the way they love--bright, fierce, as if they would perish without it--that makes you so sure that they need to be in this world a little longer.

There are days when you think each and every being is fallen. There are days when you think a special few might make up for the rest.

 

Magnus loves. He loves so many people, and he loves them fully, even if he doesn’t let them love him fully in return.

He doesn’t like to think of those that he lost, preferring to live in the moment, but, as if he can’t help himself, he still keeps a chest full of trinkets in the back of his closet that hold much more sentimental value than monetary.

Eventually, he grows tired. Eventually, he stops filling that chest up.

 

There are words that need to be said. They crawl in your stomach, hiding in the deepest parts your body, but you know they are there, and, more importantly, Alec knows too. He’s expecting you to tell him of your life, your loves and your pain and all the memories that stay memories despite you trying not the think of them.

It’s going to hurt, is the thing. No matter what you do, you’re going to lose him eventually, and he’ll take those pieces of you that you give him with him.

The only difference is that now, you’ll believe it’s worth the strife building yourself back up will entail.

In the quiet of your bedroom, you hold each other on the mattress of your bed, aching body against aching body. The words are there, crawling, but Alec smoothes a calming hand down your bare back, soothing the words into a temporary submission.

There is time to tell him, yet. You don’t have forever, but you have time.

If there is one thing each of you has learned from the other, it is patience.

 

Magnus Bane meets a scrappy red-headed girl, a cocky golden boy, a glasses wearing mundane, a whip-smart beauty, and _him_ on an average Friday night.

He doesn’t expect anything to come of it.


End file.
